


Someone New

by thewritingotter



Series: Short ones [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Pining, Rose Tyler Loves the Doctor, The Doctor Loves Rose Tyler, and a sprinkling of, just a bit of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:33:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26671453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewritingotter/pseuds/thewritingotter
Summary: Everything about this new Doctor is long and skinny, from his twiggy arms and twiggy legs to the throat he displays when he's being particularly petulant. Her Doctor -- the first one -- had never felt so thin with his large leather jacket and ears.
Relationships: Ninth Doctor/Rose Tyler, Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Series: Short ones [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1880071
Comments: 6
Kudos: 36





	Someone New

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks misseditallagain!

"I feel it sometimes," the Doctor says as he pulls at yet another random crank-thing. The Tardis responds with a particularly sharp _woo_ before she banks right with the grace of an approaching Slitheen. If it weren't for the pulley her hands are currently tangled with, Rose would've slid right off. 

"Feel what?" she asks when the Tardis rights herself. The time vortex has long gone from Rose's system and whatever memories she'd had of it are locked deep in her mind, but she still sometimes feels _alien_ things. Things like the Tardis's disgruntled protest at being jostled around by the strange new doctor. 

"Him," the Doctor says lightly although Rose knows him well enough now to know that that was not said lightly at all. He darts left, punching a few buttons with his long skinny fingers. 

Everything about this new Doctor is long and skinny, from his twiggy arms and twiggy legs to the throat he displays when he's being particularly petulant. Her Doctor -- the first one -- had never felt so thin with his large leather jacket and ears. He'd felt substantial, wide-shouldered, and even his darling old face had made her feel protected. Lo-

Safe. 

She shakes that thought away. 

“Him? Him who?” she asks distractedly as the Doctor points frantically at her and then at the shiny orange button in front of her with one of his rusty wrenches. She dives in pressing her palm flat against it.

“Keep pressing it,” he yells, swinging right next to her to tug at a rattling control only to swing back for yet another rattling control. “And it’s whom.”

“Whom what?” she yells back as the Tardis starts creaking in time with her pressing the orange button. 

“What?”

“Whom _what_?”

“Oh!” He laughs, pressing down at a lever twice before moving on. This new doctor can’t seem to stop _moving_ , always running or jumping or fussing about with his arms. No time for stillness, for soft quiet conversations that seem all the more lovelier when there always seemed to be trouble to be had. Still, Rose prefers this to the absolute unmoving stoniness the Doctor was when he-

He’s not dead, she tells herself firmly, he’s here, he’s alive, he’s _moving_.

“Him _whom_ ,” the Doctor continues, oblivious to the dark turn Rose’s thoughts have taken, “not him _who_.”

She laughs. “Come off it, it is not!”

“Is too!” He slams one of his hammers against a button. “Whom when the person referred to is the object of the sentence rather than the subject.” He slams it again when the way the Tardis hums displeases him. “Or, simply enough, it’s whom when the answer to the question can be answered with a _him_.”

“That’s daft!”

“It’s _English_ ,” he says with the air of a child who thinks he’s more clever than he really is, “so uncomplicatedly complicated.”

“You’re such a swot,” she teases as the Tardis suddenly swoops into a smooth glide. 

He beams. “A swot, that’s me!”

She’s more taken aback by this than she should’ve been -- something in her frowning deeply when the expected defensive _What- what’s wrong with being a swot? Some of the greatest minds in the universe are swots, including clever old me!_ doesn’t come.

She laughs this away. “Of course you are.”

With a final swat at a wheel from the doctor, the Tardis slows to a graceful stop, idling into the now familiar rhythm of her hovering somewhere in space. The Doctor hops by Rose’s side excitedly, tucking his hands behind him even as he bounces on his feet. “Well, Rose Tyler, are you ready to see one of the most beautiful things in the universe?”

“Am I ever!” she cheers, smile so wide her cheeks hurt. This is one of her favourite things: the anticipation, the exciting unknowing of what’s on the other side of the door. He sketches a bow, and with an untidy curtsy of her own, she bounds down and to the door.

“Mind the step!” he yells after her, although he’s not at all too far behind.

She swings the door open and a gust of air blows her hair into her face as the Tardis’s protective barrier springs up. She spares her a quick thought of reprimand, wiping blond strands from her eyes. “Oh I bet you’re enjoying this,” she says, turning back to the console.

“Oi, don’t talk to her like that!” the Doctor exclaims.

“I’ll talk to her however I like!” Rose shoots back even as she strokes a panel in apology. The Tardis knows Rose loves her to pieces. “Really, Doctor, you know she-” her own gasp interrupts her as she turns back to the scene beyond the Tardis.

She knows what blue and pink are and the softness of white that can hurt sometimes, but she also knows that she can’t possibly know and see all of the colours in front of her. There in the midst of the inky darkness of space is a bright shifting mass, the colours too bright to be decipherable. It seems to sing to her, so soft and yearning, a huge yawn of loneliness.

It pulses suddenly, and like a single strum of a note, something ripples and echoes and expands, creating another of the spheres around it as it shimmers.

It is, indeed, one of the most beautiful things in the universe.

“Ah, just in time to catch it,” the Doctor says, dipping close to her ear. She nods, spellbound by the beauty beyond them. 

“What is it?” she whispers.

“NGC6543,” the Doctor says, and when she looks up to him it’s reflected in his lovely brown eyes. “Or as it’s commonly known: the Cat’s Eye Nebula.”

“A nebula.”

The Doctor nods. “Discovered in 1786 for you lot by William Herschel. He was right that this is a planetary nebula but the whole planetary nebulae begets new planetary systems thing is a whole load of tosh.”

Rose frowns -- she was never one for astronomy. “What’s a…”

“Planetary nebulae are formed from the death of a star,” the Doctor goes on patiently, “like ashes after a phoenix dies. The whole process takes thousands- _tens_ of thousands of years.”

“And it…” she turns back to the nebula. “It has gone on like this for a long time now? Dying alone, changing alone?”

“Yes,” the Doctor says, and she doesn’t know what it is exactly, but something in his voice tugs at her heart. 

“Doctor...” she trails off. She places a hand on his arm, a worried frown on her face. “Doctor, are you…”

The Doctor straightens up, a smile so wide and so bright it rivals the nebula on his handsome face. “More for us to see! Remember that pulse earlier?” Rose nods. “Only happens every, oh, one thousand five hundred years!”

“No way!”

“Absolutely way!”

“Thank god we caught it in the nick of time, eh?” she teases. He preens, head cocked back and shoulders square. “I’m impressed.”

“As you should be,” he says, lips spreading even wider. “It takes considerable skill to get to a specific place at a specific time. Safely.”

“Is that why we’re almost never where or when we’re supposed to be?”

“Oi!”

She laughs so hard, she’s almost doubled over. She reaches over to him, threading an arm through his to keep her balance, cheek pressed against his shoulder. It’s a while, but he eventually, slowly, reaches over to close his other hand over hers. 

“Oh don’t be cross,” she says when he remains silent instead of giggling along with her, “you know I-”

Instead of the fond irritation she’s used to from the other Doctor’s ( _same Doctor_ , she reminds herself) face, she opens her eyes to something- not sad, no, something less miserable than sad: a soft bend on his eyebrows, the gentle narrowing of large cow eyes. He smiles at her like he wishes he can smile better.

She slides her arm back to herself, straightening her clothes and her hair as she steps back. Clearing her throat, she bends down to sit at the edge of the Tardis, letting her legs dangle in space. “Thank you,” she says, “for having the considerable skill to take me here.”

He sits next to her, all gangly and long like a teenager just learning his limbs. “You’re welcome,” he says. They sit in silence for a while, staring at the nebula. 

There’s something quite macabre about a dead thing that can move like this, Rose thinks, shimmering and shifting like it were a live thing just newly created. When she was seven, she and Shareen had found a dead rat just outside the estate. They’d fancied themselves brave, walking up to it and brandishing long sticks that they’d used to poke and prod at it. But when it had seemingly turned on its own after a particularly hard jab, they’d both run back up to Rose’s mum’s flat, screaming and crying about an undead rat. 

She’s turning to tell the Doctor this when he says, voice low, “I feel it sometimes.”

She frowns. “Feel what?”

“Him.”

“Erm.” She cocks her head. “Who-”

“Me. Him. Other me.” The Doctor runs a hand through his hair, ruffling it as his fingers pass the back of his head. 

Rose’s heart beats that familiar note of longing. “Other you?”

“I feel what he felt for you sometimes.”

“I- I don’t… I mean I suppose you _are_ the same person,” she pauses unsurely, biting her bottom lip. “Aren’t you?”

He hums non-committedly, playing with a stray string on his trousers. He plucks it out, twirling it in his fingers before he blows it away into the cosmos. “Yes.” He purses his lips. “No.”

“Well that’s good to know, isn’t it?” she jokes weakly. 

“Nine regenerations,” he says, “each one more familiar than the last. I’ve had a lot of companions in my lifetime, Rose, and I adored every single one of them. It hurts every time I’ve had to leave them or when they had to leave me. I’ve learned to go on, learned to tamp down this fondness so I _can_ go on.”

“Do you ever miss them?” Rose asks softly.

He nods. “Yes. But that grows duller as I regenerate. But you-” he presses a hand against one of his hearts, “you’re still here. And this- what he felt for you pulses every so often, reminding me of him and of you and of youandhim. It’s almost as if… he never completely went away.”

Her eyes widen, and she looks away, pressing her lips together. “And what,” she says when she thinks she’s composed herself, “what was it he felt for me?”

He looks up to her from under dark lashes, brown eyes so much and so unlike older blue ones. “Does it need to be said?”

“Yes,” she whispers, “yes.”

He hesitates, turning back to the Nebula. A sneakered foot taps an odd beat against the Tardis and his arms wrap around his shin. He’s small, she thinks, small and thin and wiry when he folds himself like this, somehow much younger than her other Doctor. 

“You don’t have to answer,” she says, trying to ignore her own disappointment. “It’s not- I don’t need to… to know. I just-” She misses him. She misses him so fiercely that she sometimes forgets he’s not dead at all. Just different, she reminds herself. Not dead like her Aunt Jocelyn, but changed like a moth that was once a caterpillar.

Like a dead star becoming a nebula.

It’s a long while before the doctor says so quietly she almost didn’t hear him, “He loved you.”

“Oh,” she says just as quietly. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry.”

What she meant to say was _there’s nothing to be sorry about_ or _it wasn’t your fault_ or even _I knew, of course, I knew_ , but what comes out instead is a sob that she hasn’t realised she’d been holding on to, that deep well of loss and mourning that she never thought she’d been justified or right enough to have. 

_Stop it_ , she scolds herself firmly even as her breath hitches and tears continue to track dark mascara down her cheeks, _he’s here, he’s your Doctor, he’s alive_. That guilt comes again, how she’d gambled with his life with her rash and foolish decisions twice, with the second one having finally done him in. And then when he needed her the most, when he was vulnerable and healing and at his weakest, she’d gone and denied who he was. Is. 

Hot headed and daft, that’s her, silly old Rose.

Long twiggy arms wrap around her, pulling her into a narrow chest, and her hands scramble across his arms, over his shoulders, to his strong back. She cries in his arms like she had the day they watched the Earth die, and maybe it’s wrong (she thinks it’s a lot wrong), but she tries to imagine she’s clutching at a leather jacket instead of a pinstriped suit. 

Outside, the nebula continues to shimmer and shift, a neverending dying thing.

\---

“Do you feel… like he does. For me?” she asks haltingly later on when she’s wrapped in a blanket and there’s a perfectly steaming mug of cocoa in her hands.

He stops fussing about his controls, energetic vibrating body suddenly so still. “I don’t know,” he says.

“Ah.” She’s not sure if she’s relieved or disappointed.

“I’m not him.”

“But he’s you.”

The Doctor nods.

“Do you think you could ever-” she stops herself, taking a hasty sip of her chocolate. She looks up to him watching her, the tilt of his head birdlike. “Never mind, that was a stupid-”

“Maybe,” he says, although it sounded more like _eventually_.

“Yeah?” she asks with a hesitant smile.

He smiles back, this one gentler and sweeter than the bright ones he so often wears. “You’re you,” he says confidently, as if this answers all of the questions she has yet to ask.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Now, Rose Tyler,” he bounds to the other side of the Tardis’s console, jabbing at a few buttons, “how would you like to go to a new new planet?”

She laughs. “New _new_?”

“New new planet, new new country.” He smiles at her cheekily. “New new travels.”

She drains her mug, settling it neatly amongst the blanket as she swings up the console. “New new travels,” she echoes.

He beams, bright and happy and so beautiful it hurts. “Well, as they say,” he winks at her, “allons-y!”


End file.
